I am aware that I am very lucky, though. It is a privilege to be allowed to live and work in another country. Would I be happier if I had stayed in Denmark? - Maybe. It's impossible to tell, but I do know that I am and have been very happy here and I do believe that I've had more breaks and chances in London that I would have had in Denmark. And that's the reason why I left in the first place: to seek happiness and a better way of life. Isn't that why everybody else leave their home countries too?

I am also quite fortunate that my chosen partner is from another EU country and that he is therefore able to go back to Denmark with me, should we choose to do so. He can work there and live there as much as he wants, without having to marry me. He does, however, have to be able to support himself, but Danes are kind to English-speaking IT people, so I'm not too worried. Different is it for my Danish friend, who married a non-EU person, which makes it worlds more difficult for them to return. Is it fair, that just because he was born a bit further away, they have to go through tonnes and tonnes of procedures every time they want to go away on holiday, let alone relocate? Will they have to stay in Sweden for the next couple of years? Or will they qualify for a 'love-visa' or whatever it's called, this grand idea of the Danish government?

And if one of the reasons for the tightened refugee law is that asylum seekers may bring their entire families, who says that my beloved is not eventually going to bring his mussel-eating, beer-guzzling family to Denmark? Life is not fair.

However, as I am an expat, and my bank statements say that I have emigrated, just as they would say that another person is a banker or a teacher, I cannot possibly have any realistic idea of what it is like to live in Denmark at the moment. Maybe the country is flooded with weird-looking, incomprehensible, smelly foreigners, who steal the Danish girls and the Danish money and the Danish houses and the Danish jobs. Maybe they all rape Danish women and kill Danish men and only wait for one opportunity to make the country theirs.
But I don't think so. I think that if you keep telling someone, throughout his or her life that s/he is different, or 'other', then one day they'll start believing it. I also think that even though asylum-seekers are deported, you will not automatically get a new washing machine. Or a better car. Or whatever else it is that makes you so jealous that you can't spare a thought for another human being.
posted by charlotte at 16:09 - comment